The article itself is a list of prior art of introspection and a critique of Marc’s lack of awareness of said art.
It's admittedly hard to remain in curious conversation about things that are so activating, so it's quite understandable that people do it.
The point would be the same if you swapped any other individuals in for those 5.
Rich less empathetic than poor, study says https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/rich-less-empathet...
How Wealth Reduces Compassion https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wealth-reduce...
If you go along the donor list and search for remarks the biggest political donors have made you'll note that most of them are severely lacking in the 'how-to-human' department.
These are the people buying your politics. I still maintain that GP's assessment stands.
As for the comment type, there's nothing disparaging or even insulting about it. I don't know whether GP is a native English speaker, but as an ESL I can't find anything generalising or otherwise wrong with it. I have flagged a lot of comments for posters calling others Nazis or other insults or getting personal and I'm absolutely sure a lot remain. I have no feeling what kinds of failure you're reacting to here and this is grounds for general insecurity.
"Look around at all these things I have - how could I be wrong when I have so much?"
And that's how you get the Andreessen's and Musk's of the world stating these nonsensical things as truth. In their minds, financial success is the ultimate yardstick. The fact that they have so much wealth is a testament that their way of thinking is always right.
You don't need to look very hard to see this is what they really believe. Elon has done extremely silly things like claiming he was the best Path of Exile player in the world because he paid several people grind his account to a high-level. Having enough money to pay someone to play the game for you, is the same as being good at the game, in his mind.
In a loopy recursive way, it is. Cost gates what we can do and become. Paying back your costs to extend your runway is the working principle behind biology, economy and technology. I am not saying rich people are always right, just that cost is not so irrelevant to everything else. I personally think cost satisfaction explains multiple levels, from biology up.
Related to introspection - it certainly has a cost for doing it, and a cost for not doing it. Going happy go lucky is not necessarily optimal, experience was expensive to gain, not using it at all is a big loss. Being paralyzed by rumination is also not optimal, we have to act in time, we can't delay and if we do, it comes out differently.
If you look at the entire entirety of understood history of biology:
The most ruthless always wins
That is to say if I go into a village and kill all the adults and teenagers and steal all the kids who are scared to be killed by me, then I will win in the probably two successive generations that I’ve been able to successfully brainwashing into thinking I’m some kind of God.
That is until somebody kills me and then takes over the structure. For example there are no dictatorships that last past the third generation
That is literally and unambiguously how all life operates
There are intermediary cooperation periods. But if you look at the aggregate time periods including how galaxies form it’s all straight up brute force consumption
In their society, and in so many others who have been crushed by the forces of empire over the eons, the leaders of the people did not get there by murdering their way to the top. They were respected persons who were elevated to that position by the people.
Tradition tells us the Cherokee did once have a heriditary priestly class, who were called the Ani-kutani, or Nicotani. The people long suffered under their arrogance until one of them went too far, raping a woman while her husband was away. Her husband then amassed an uprising of the people and they killed out the Nicotani to the last man.
(An existence proof that it can be done, if nothing else.)
Oh none?
Is that because their peaceful means were so successful in not being dominated by a massive group of unencumbered rapists and Pillagers?
What precisely is the argument you’re making here because all you’re doing is proving my point
So again, the most ruthless win
So unfortunately it’s insufficient to simply be cooperative and the fact that macro level cooperation appears to be rare in the universe
Further, the existing examples of mutual cooperative organizations are so rare as to be non-existent. Humans seem to prefer (or are biologically limited to preferring) competition based social and economic structures.
Placement almost perfectly dictates whether high level psychopaths wind up in jail or the boardroom
- Chuang Zhu (late 4th century B.C.)
I feel like they will never suffer the consequences of their actions in any negative way should they get it wrong.
Rarely do we see billionaires not become billionaires because they know how the game is played because they shaped the game so they only ever fail upwards.
Yes, which is why the ranks of the very wealthy are filled with lucky grifters. They got rich by luck, then expanded that wealth with some combination of fanciful statements, lies, and outright fraud.
No one would think that was a reasonable position.
No one would argue, "Well, food DOES have draw backs. What if you eat too much of it!"
We all inherently understand that you have to eat food, and while being careful not to eat too much.
We would understand that if anyone said, "Look at all these successful people who also didn't eat food!" that they were talking absolute shite.
No one would treat the statement "I don't eat food" as anything other than deeply fucking weird.
Humans are social creatures. We are biologically inclined to follow charismatic leaders, even off a cliff. In most people, the susceptibility to suggestion is much stronger than the strength of their rational beliefs. Just look at American politics, for example.
All of this is to say that if Andreessen said, "I don't eat food," there would be a small but vocal group who would see that as validation of their beliefs; there would be a think-piece in the Atlantic about the history of breatharianism; Hacker News comments about what does "food" mean, really, etc. Yes, people would take it seriously. Just because he's rich and has therefore bought a loud megaphone.
To go back to your biology point:
Figures like Andreessen or Musk (or, at least in my opinion most billoniares) can be directly compared to cancer. They are EXCELLENT at extracting value from the environment they're in. If you limit your moral judgement to just that... then you clearly think cancer is wonderful, since it does the same thing!
Cancer is a group of cells that chemically signal the body to provide resources and spread themselves without restraint, avoiding internal systems that would regulate it via things like apoptosis or other signaling. If you judge a cell by how many resources it can accumulate... Cancer is wildly successful.
But the problem is that extraction without introspection, success with insight, moving without care... eventually actors like this destroy the system they operate within.
Ex - Andreessen should perhaps spend some introspection on the fact that ultimately "dollar bills" are literal cloth (or more likely... digital numbers) that he can't eat, won't shelter him, and can't emotionally satisfy him.
They strictly have value because of the system he operates within that allows exchange, and if he acts without care of that system... he might destroy it. Or it might destroy him.
---
So directly to your point: There is clearly a need for more introspection than "zero". And suggesting otherwise is unbelievably conceited. It is cancerous, and should be treated as such.
I'm damn near broke right now but it would be obvious to you if you spent ten minutes with me that I'm healthier both mentally and physically than either of those two and I can walk down any street with relative impunity and talk with any stranger I meet without concern that they'd recognize me and have beef with me over some stupid shit I did online. I know that when I interact with people it's because they want to interact with me and not my money.
It's true that the cage they live in is gilded but it's still a cage.
Sometimes I stumble across wikipedia biography pages a person like a mumblerapper who had a meteoric rise in fame and wealth only to die in a puddle of puke from a Xanax overdose at like 25. It's sad and everything but when I read it I just think "Man, what a fucking idiot..." Like sure this dude probably had a great few years conspicuously consuming a bunch of shit and showing off a bunch of money with some floozies hanging off his arm but where is he now? Dead and cold in a hole in the ground. And he died a pretty pathetic death to boot.
I don't know about Andressen but I'm pretty sure I'll outlive Musk. As risk adverse as he is for his physical safety he'll end up doing something downright stupid that ends in his untimely death. With Andressen there's a growing possiblity that enough people wise up to his destructive impact on society and a movement where people who are still physically capable but with inoperable brain cancer or something start taking out people like Andressen.
Slow and steady wins the race.
They can't go to grocery stores. They can't go to parks. They can't go to casual events. They can't be spontaneous and they can't be serendipitous. Any relationship they have with people is in the shadow of their image. Most people they interact with are trying to grift them in some was as they are a publicly known high value mark. People value what they can get from them vs their personality. Over time they subconsciously under stand this, start to trust no one, and rely heavily on a circle of people who happen to be in reach who may still be grifting them. It is like they live in some artificial habitat on earth, supported by staff, not actually on earth.
I don't think many people would agree with such positions.
I do think that people who have succeeded financially might adopt that ethos as an ex post rationalization.
You don't even need an amazing job to do that though
How many different occupations do you think you would find on the important list. Would it have scientists, mathematicians, doctors, engineers, world leaders, activists, religious figures, teachers?
How many occupations do you think would be on the richest list?
Do you think it is fair to judge the success of Martin Luther King Jr or Albert Einstein based on the amount of money they made?
The primary issue with this is that there is a significant amount of luck involved in acquiring large sums of wealth.
It's hard to get firm numbers around this, but it's estimated around 30-40% of the wealthiest people in the world, derive their wealth almost entirely from inheritance. It's actually very difficult to measure this accurately because a lot of studies will report people as "self-made" even if they started with a small $10 million loan from their parents.
Wealth also follows power laws such that it's significantly easier to acquire more of it once you pass certain thresholds.
Take Mark Cuban - made billions selling some crappy radio service to Yahoo!. Has done effectively nothing since then except for re-investing the proceeds from the buyout. He's technically self-made but it's hard to argue he was anything other than lucky.
It's very obvious to gamers when someone hasn't played, it actually doesn't matter whether you have high level gear.
There's things you can't buy with money, and respect is one of them. He fundamentally doesn't understand how status works. He could, for free, just put out a video where he says "look at me, I'm a busy CEO, but I play this game even though I'm bad at it".
People would think positively about that.
[0]https://fortune.com/2025/01/20/elon-musk-video-games-scandal...
People who lie about things like that make me sad. It's actually a hard thing to do. Waste of time? Absolutely.
At least wealth is a quantifiable measure of success in our society.
In contrast, many posters on HN think they're always right (it's notorious for it) with no qualifications whatsoever.
This discussion is a sea of jealously and a perfect example.
Also, a lot of wealthly people aren't stupid like we think. They're evil, which is different. And being evil is actually pretty good for being wealthy. Most people are encumbered by their morality. Evil people are not, so they can do much more.
Yes, the only reason anyone could have for criticizing the ultra-wealthy is jealousy. It's just the haders, b.
Einstein, Gandhi, Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr, Orwell had tremendous public impact and “success”, with relatively little wealth to show for it.
Wealth gives those with shallow sense of values an easy scoreboard to look down on others, which is how you get disasters like Sam Bankman-Fried’s failed attempt at “effective altruism”, or almost-trillionaires like Musk gutting the federal government, while extracting billions in public funding and subsidies.
To be _abundantly_ clear, I agree with you and your assumptions here - but, please note that you are making some assumptions here about what "success" is defined as, which might explain why other people disagree.
I’m assuming they meant to imply wealth is a measure of positive social impact, which is a bad measure for the reasons I stated. They also might mean it as a proxy for “rightness”, whatever that is, which is even more of a problem but for different reasons.
I don't see any basis for assuming that (again, I say this respectfully - I hold similar values to what I'm assuming you do)
> They also might mean it as a proxy for “rightness”
This feels closer, but still not right IMO. I see it more as a claim that "success" is "ability to achieve one's _own_ aims" - personally, internally-established objectives - whereas you (and I) are trying to tie "success" to external, pro-social measures. Basically, selfishness vs. community.
In fact, there is a bizarre visceral hatred for all the old Netscape guys here—Marc, Brendan, and Jamie—who in particular probably hates this place back even more, even though they are directly responsible for 95% of HN posters having jobs today.
To create great wealth in a vibrant capitalist society you have to have some model about the world you can exploit. It can be a better rocket design, some insight into human psychology that can help you raise money, or something else.
Some people fall ass backwards into money through luck, but that's rare, and people with great wealth don't have that luxury because they would squander it away and won't be able to grow what they have been given. At any extreme, you have to have both luck and skill. The best athletes are both incredibly gifted and incredibly hard working
They could be wrong on some things but to pretend they don't have a somewhat functional world model that is different enough from the consensus that it allows them to exploit it for great wealth is just naive.
I think the flip side would be "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" I prefer why aren't you happy myself, but sure, random person commenting on the internet about how the wealthiest people in the world don't know anything about the world, why haven't you exploited your superior knowledge relative to said billionaire to amass great wealth for yourself?
Paul Dirac (1902–1984) was a British theoretical physicist and mathematician whose work on the Dirac equation (1928), which merged quantum mechanics with special relativity, predicted the existence of antimatter, specifically the positron. His approach to this discovery was deeply rooted in a mathematical philosophy that valued elegance, consistency, and a belief that nature is fundamentally mathematical, often placing him ahead of experimental validation.
Radical conservatism in physics, often associated with John Archibald Wheeler, is a philosophical approach that adheres strictly to established, successful principles—like quantum mechanics or general relativity—while pushing them to extreme, unexpected logical conclusions. It involves modifying as few laws as possible (conservative) while daringly following the math to radical insights.
Money simply invested in a market fund generally creates wealth, and that doesn't require a model of the world that's much more sophisticated than the average person's.
"Some people fall ass backwards into money through luck, but that's rare," This feels unsupported as well. How could you even attempt to quantify what percent of success is due to luck, much less establish confidence that this percent is going down?
As an individual? No. There's an interesting paradox here.
The paradox is that almost no matter what game you're playing, you want to play safe when you're winning and take chances when you're losing. That's what most rich people actually do, and naturally they take as few chances as they can.
But the richest of the rich, aren't going to be those. The very richest are going to be those who are comfortably winning, but still feel the need to take high-risk bets. Usually because of a pathological need to prove themselves.
A few of them, that is. For every Jobs, Musk etc. there's going to be twenty rich failsons who failed in their big bets. You just don't hear about them - why would you, they're now a much lower tier of rich.
So I don't think it's necessary to assume the super-rich has a better model of the world than average. Because of this effect, I think they're more likely to have deeply flawed models of the world, and in particular, deeply self-destructive personal values.
There are a number of recent antics from Musk and Trump in particular which I think can illustrate that well. You'd think they'd both be happier people if they were more content with what they had and weren't so eager to fuck up the world for the rest of us - but their messed up personal values get in the way of that.
You and I have vastly different mental models of the world. Or, at least, very different definitions of “luck”. For example, I would probably say that anyone who is rich through a “family business” has quite a bit of “luck” to thank (by my definition), except for the founder. And even then, the founder is usually “lucky” by connections (e.g. generous government contracts).
> and people with great wealth don't have that luxury because they would squander it away and won't be able to grow what they have been given
If I had to guess, it probably takes about an IQ of 90 to not lose generational wealth, unless there’s an addiction at play. Maybe even less.
I'm going to take a wild guess, but I would bet you never ran a business. I've never heard this from anyone that ran a business. Sure they give you the whole "I am very fortunate and lucky in my life" but never "yes, it's trivial to run a business"
And my other bet would be you had never had any extended interaction with a 90 IQ individual
No, I said except for the founders. Real easy to be the brother or son or aunt to the family business founder and become rich.
> I've never heard this from anyone that ran a business.
I never said “not time consuming” or “stressful”, which I feel like you’re putting those words in my mouth. The first thing I usually hear from (especially braggarts) small business owners is about the biggest contract that they have, which is usually some government contract or bid that they won from Walmart or Amazon. When ZIRP dried up I heard less bragging about such contracts.
> And my other bet would be you had never had any extended interaction with a 90 IQ individual
All four years of my American public high school education. I’m saying the bottom 25% of my high school class might lose generational wealth through poor decisions (90 IQ is roughly 75% of population). I think that’s fair. We are talking about generational wealth, after all. I can think of a few 90 IQ people from my graduating class that are trust fund kids who haven’t managed to lose it all yet.
I never made a suggestion that financial success is completely independent of anything.
> They could be wrong on some things but to pretend they don't have a somewhat functional world model that is different enough from the consensus that it allows them to exploit it for great wealth is just naive.
It's naive to think that financial success sometimes blinds people into thinking they are generally an expert in all areas?
> but sure, random person commenting on the internet about how the wealthiest people in the world don't know anything about the world
Also, never said anything to this effect.
> why haven't you exploited your superior knowledge relative to said billionaire to amass great wealth for yourself?
How could you possibly know if I have, or have not?
Your entire reply is effectively an unrelated tangent to what I said.
It's worse than that: he thinks the point of playing games is to be number 1 in the world.
Better to just not think about it.
One of many, many, many stupid things he's said.
Musk made a company that jumpstarted some wealth and invested in other things which exploded.
Toto Wolff is a gazillionaire because he too made some pretty incredibly timed investments.
point is, extreme wealth results from some combination of work, timing luck, strategy, and sociopathy, but they're not all required to span the space of wealthy people.
There's no way to stay a billionaire without being one, as long as there's abject poverty and suffering.
I've never had billions of dollars and realistically I probably won't ever have billions of dollars, but I would certainly like to think that I'd keep enough for myself to keep myself thoroughly entertained, and then give the rest away somehow.
Of course, I've never been tested with this. Maybe if I was gifted billions of dollars I'd be as evil as the rest of the billionaires.
This is the kind of person who would benefit from being raised and humanised in a village where people co-operate. Because then, as countless others have discovered, bluster and insults work only until the self-aggrandising narcissist meets someone not only bigger, but with better principles, and an actual leader of people.
There is a reason why many satisfying movie plots involve a final, usually violent comeuppance served to a self-aggrandising narcissist.
It turns out that when you actually allow yourself to feel those things, it gives your nervous system the ability to metabolize and process them.
I sometimes encounter this phenomenon among college students in my job as a professor. Most college students have learned some form of it, but not all of them. I often think "somebody should teach them those skills" but it has always felt like it was out of scope for _me_ to be the one teaching them. I'm supposed to be teaching computer science. On the other hand, being unable to act rationally on stimulus is ultimately self-sabotaging, and will they be able to absorb my lessons if they can't get past little things like the way I look or the way I dress? This is not a hypothetical: any faculty member whose courses solicit end of semester feedback gets comments like "I didn't like his class because he seemed smug" or "I could not concentrate because I hated her accent" and nonsense like that.
I think they're reflexive people and for Andreessen the long period where he was massively invested in the shadiest crypto companies required pushing a culture of conformity.
A lot of Andreessen's investments were essentially pyramid schemes and the greatest threat to those investments was intellectual honesty & introspection.
Under that pressure from him and others a lot of the tech world shifted towards being more tribal. We saw a huge shift away from intellectual honesty and critiquing actions & ideas on their merits to instead a culture of fiercely defending founders and relentless hype.
I also believe that's why they shifted towards the political rightwing, because the more tribalist approach is presently rewarded on that side.
edit: I don't mean just to shoot you down here--I think there's a counterargument to be made here. It might start with "those folks really are the same as us, responding and acting as we ourselves would when dropped into that environment and surroundings". That would hinge on observing the actions and behaviors of someone who, having lived a life as a billionaire, has lost or forsworn that level of fortune and whose lives we might now judge as in the range of "normal". I think that'll be hard to find; the wealthy making public pledges to give away 99% of their wealth are still ludicrously wealthy, and to my knowledge all make that commitment to do so around when they die--not before.
The ultra wealthy are very different from anyone else. First of all, their focus gets to be about power, everyone else's is survival and making the rent. Second they have armies of ass kissers. Third, they have no job and can even own politicians. And of course their wealth isolates them from repercursions anyone else would face, and puts their experience way out of phase with the regular people.
And we should also account for the sociopathic drive that made them rich in the first place (sociopaths are overrepresented in higher status positions).
While there are exceptions with people who were lucky and were at the right spot at the right time, there is a different distribution of character traits compared to society at large.
1. In 1926, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the rich “are different from you and me,” and Ernest Hemingway supposedly retorted, “Yes, they have more money.”
2. Kurt Vonnegut's obituary for Joseph Heller...
True story, Word of Honor: Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island. I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel ‘Catch-22’ has earned in its entire history?” And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.” And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?” And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.” Not bad! Rest in peace!”
Or, as Cyndi Lauper sang it, 'Money Changes Everything'
I'm of the latter persuasion, that wealth influences one's personality in important ways.
The people that feel the need to be loud and in the public eye aren't necessarily playing 4d chess. It's really just an ego thing for them.
The wealthy who keep a low-profile are the smarter one's.
Many in these positions get there by being really good/smart/lucky at something once and then having a war chest of capital to deploy for life.
It doesn't mean they are a polymath genius with unique worthwhile insights into all facets of the human experience. In fact, it may almost be the opposite. The hyper focus and hustle required to attain what they do often requires withdrawing from the wider world, not being particularly well read, and living in a socioeconomic/political/work bubble.
Because rich people have both the power and motivation to define it in a manner in which they still win. Wealth can be education. Wealth can be contacts. Wealth can be properties. Wealth can be businesses. Wealth can be in other countries.
Concentration of power stems from our inability to make good decisions as a group of equals. We have to choose someone to make decisions for the group because there is currently no other working way to make them. Current technology might enable us to find some form of true democracy, but I'm not sure if anyone is looking for it.
The 51% voters are just another self-interested power center that will favor themselves and extract resources from the 49%. Not to mention that the system can be corrupted at every point. For instance, you still need police and military to enforce the results of group decisions; and at any moment they can seize power and take control, unless they're placated with preferential treatment by the system - reinventing systemic hierarchy.
There is no system that is immune to human corruption. And all the high-minded belief in the human spirit, and the good-will of democracy, falls flat with even a cursory examination of previous attempts.
Direct democracy has defects that have been apparent for thousands of years. I believe Plato was one of the first to argue that democracy turned into mob rule.[0] It seems unlikely that this was entirely original. Similar ideas must have been current in Athens well before his time, since they had abundant experience with demagogues and other problems during the Peloponnesian War. I don't think Plato's solution (Philosopher Kings) was correct, but it's harder to argue against his framing.
It therefore seems like a question of which approach is less bad up front and whether it decays into something worse. Personally I would satisfied with a functioning republic in the US, which is where I live. What we have now is an oligarchy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_political_philosophy
This feels like a rule of the universe, from plants and solar systems to wealth portfolios.
Only catastrophic events break it up.
He is wrong about almost everything, and especially about introspection.
But he got lucky and wrote a good-enough-for-the-time browser at just the right time.
Now, he mistakes his luck and his F_U_Money for skill and intelligence. And why wouldn't he? He can simply walk away from any situation that makes it seem he is wrong.
And the broader problem in society is nearly the entire populace has been conditioned to ignore the factors of luck and mistake monetary success with hard work and wisdom, when in fact those people are often no more than massively amplified fools.
The massive follies of most these current robber barons makes the case for taxing them out of existence. Once someone has enough money that they and their family cannot spend it in multiple lifetimes of excessive luxury, the only reason to have more is power. We should ramp up tax rates so those people cannot accumulate that power.
Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. A society that fails to manage that fact of human nature dooms itself.
He's free to choose what to believe. He's not "insulated from his negative world view". If you're correct and introspection is to his benefit and he chooses to forgo it, it's his loss.
So I don't know what you're upset about.
I think his broader point is that people are too introspective in modern times and its paralyzing. For instance, I remember reading a blog that argues that argues PTSD doesn't exist historically. People saw terrible things, buried their children and suffered unimaginable pain but there were no concept of PTSD. He argues that its not because it was taboo (virtually every other topic that was taboo was extensively documented), so perhaps there was less introspection.
https://acoup.blog/2020/04/24/fireside-friday-april-24-2020/
It is that war was ubiquitous and accepted as a positive thing in society, unlike now where it is viewed as at best a necessary evil.
The smaller version of same phenomena I see in enterprises where musings of non/barely technical leadership of a tech org is not only considered as go-to strategy but also why previous plans and implementations which were so obviously crappy not totally replaced yet.
Musk slanders a cave diver trying to rescue trapped children as a paedo? No problem! The courts said it's fine. It's just a joke bro, you should be laughing.
Andreeson frontruns pump and dump shitcoins on retail investors via coinbase et al? Don't worry about it! Conning and scamming is fine now. The dog either eats or gets eaten.
We are far too kind to people being visibily obnoxious people because they are rich.
Then and now, having a platform isn't the same as having an effective and popular platform for force indoctrination...
If a poor person had the same view, would anything different happen? I suppose nobody would pay attention.
People having nutty views is a fact of life. Its not related to wealth. It happens among all classes.
Enough of this consequence-free bullshit is what gets you a French Revolution, and that's good for no one.